Who Was Carlos?

I was approached by Channel 9 in Australia to see if we could come up with something that would prove to Australians that maybe channelling was doubtful. So I came up with the idea of creating a channeller. I said, ‘I will create from anybody you choose, just somebody off the street, a channeller.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’ll get you an actor’, I said, ‘No, no, we don’t need an actor, we want just to show that anybody can do it.’

They said, ‘Well have you got somebody in mind?’ and my friend Jose Oliver who is an artist, was standing nearby at the time and I asked him, ‘Do you want to go to Australia?’ He said, ‘Yes’, and I said, ‘You’ll have to do something strange.’

[NOTE - it appears that there is an error in this transcript - the actor is in fact José Alvarez. Dr Paul Willis has been contacted regarding this mistake.]

He said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘You have to be a channeller’, and he said, ‘A channeller? What’s that?’ I said, ‘That’s fine, you’re perfect.’ So I turned to the phone, I said, ‘Yes, I’ve got exactly the guy.’

We trained him to be a channeller. All he had to do was look at videotapes of other people speaking in strange voices, and he picked it up right away, and eventually we got it into the Sydney Opera House with a fair audience there, all handling crystals and beads and whatnot, and with charmed looks on their faces, attracted and enthralled by this man out on stage, [José Alvarez] doing the Spirit of Carlos that was 35,000 years old.

James Randi – 7th May, 1988 interview from the Correx Archive, by Paul Willis